http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=4326&method=full

No, I have to disagree. The worst-case scenario is widespread disruption of agriculture and the loss of all or almost all coastal cities, with the accompanying displacement of huge populations. This would undoubtedly translate into the deaths of hundreds of millions of people through famine and disease, and an impact on the economy and quality of life for all of us. But the widespread disruption of agriculture does not mean the -elimination- of agriculture, plus there are groups which would have the resources to hold onto surviving resources. Look at Easter Island; life got real bad there through overconsumption and getting themselves trapped, but that didn’t mean they all died off. Humans have survived periods and areas of famine, disease and warfare nearly unimaginable by today’s standards. It doesn’t matter if you die at age 30, if you start breeding at age 15. The species continues. And yes, we have adapted to all kinds of conditions. And furthermore, yes, technology DOES continue to develop; we might lose what we have, in terms of technological capacity, but there is certainly no guarantee that we will.

The reason I pointed out that the world would have to be stripped down to its bacteria before we go, was as an illustration of just how -unlikely- this scenario is. What is entirely too likely is rather that we will continue to sacrifice biodiversity in order to grow large monocultures of a handful of staple crops.

When I point out what “peak oil” really means, and point out that it doesn’t mean that production will suddenly cease, what part of this do you disagree with, and why, and what is your evidence for this?

When I say that large groups of people will never voluntarily give up a system which has given them comfort and the ability to do many things that we cannot do with our bodies alone, can you tell me what part of that statement is false?

When I point out that the world’s poor and powerless are going to pay more of a price, and pay it earlier, for our overconsumption of resources than the richer industrialised Western populations, do you think this is false, and why?

When I say that eventually what hits them will hit us, but slower and less and it buys us time to switch to new resources while maintaining the system which brought us comfort in the first place, do you think THAT is false, and if so, why? What is your evidence that your reading of it is better than mine? (Please note, I am not advocating this as *right*, I’m just pointing out that this is how the world works; African populations are already suffering from the fact that European fleets are depleting its fisheries, for example. WE can afford fish suppers, they turn to bushmeat, with a concomitant loss of biodiversity and an influx of zoonotic diseases. They feel it, we don’t.)

You’re just handwaving it away as something it isn’t, while not engaging in any of the points that I make. I’m not saying this is all right, and I’m not claiming it’s good; but you can look at the world around us right now and -see- it.

Neither peak oil nor climate change actually threaten us with extinction; we are too well-established in too many ecological niches, the rest of the world will go down before us (and already is). The issue is just how MUCH biodiversity we lose, and how badly we will end up impacting our own quality of life before we transfer our needs onto more sustainable resources.

This is a reply more to the “Spanish Contact” than to Ken Knabb, who I think makes some good points. But — the idea of “Peak Oil” is simple: it’s the point at which the proven reserves mapped in a year are not as large as the amount of oil produced in a year, which means that we start on the downward slide of how much is available.

It’s important to realise the role that the concept of “proven reserves” plays, though — these aren’t “reserves we know are there”, these are “reserves we know are there and can get out of the ground with our existing technology.” There have been many years in which proven reserves were expanded not by new discovery, but through the improvement of recovery technology. And recently, proven reserves have expanded once again through the fact that the mineral reserves that were once inaccessible under polar ice have now become accessible due to the loss of polar ice due to, ironically, global warming. (Anyone who hauls out the stupidity of “Polar ice has recovered to 1979 levels” needs to go check the University of Illinois Cryosphere site or the NSIDC; the meme you quote started with a DailyTech article and is flatly false.)

But anyway — even though proven reserves are still expanding through these mechanisms, so are production numbers and demand, and actually, we are right at peak oil =now=. For about the last 9 years, production and proof of reserve have wobbled along about neck-and-neck — some years production has outstripped expansion of proven reserves, some years expansion of proven reserves has outstripped production; but we are no longer in the clearcut situation of expanding our reserves which has existed for over a century, and we should expect to see the drop of reserves from the “oil peak” not within 30 years or so, but within the next handful, if that many. Nevertheless, we will not see a huge drop in *production* for some years after that.

And the second point that I would make is that the assumption that capitalism and the global economy would collapse along with this has been greatly exaggerated.

Peak oil and global climate change are not going to see the collapse of capitalism and global civilisation. Humanity is just a little too robust and stubborn about the systems it likes to use. And think about it; we are omnivorous generalists with an advanced technology, who have colonised every continent, every climate and almost every ecosystem on the planet, permanently changed the face of the planet so that we no longer follow the 10% rule*, and even species like rats and cockroaches are only as successful as they are because they follow us and can exploit the environments we open up for them. The planet will be stripped down to sub-algae before we and our technology disappear. And with that in mind, humans as a whole have *never* voluntarily given up comfort, strength or convenience, and so the collective human intelligence will all be bent towards the preservation of the global economy and technology which gives us the maximum levels of these, at the point that it becomes clear to even the dimmest that these are threatened.

That is not to say that peak oil, climate change, water poverty, overpopulation etc. are not major threats ultimately to -quality- of life — they are already issues in the quality of life of millions, just not as much the rich urban industrialised West which gets first crack at use of all the world’s resources. But people will cling to the systems which brought that quality of life in the first place, and work hard to preserve them. And I think that to an underestimated extent, that will happen, too; the cost we pay for the resources we are overusing will show up in many people’s lives slowly enough and subtly enough that many will be able to blame the issues on something else entirely, and the system of technological capitalism will simply rumble on as people adapt to changed circumstances.

I don’t think that our technology will provide us with magical answers which solve all our problems and keep us from feeling any pain from our poor decision-making of the past and present. And I do think that we will end up feeling the pinch of resources in some unexpected aspects of our quality of life, and to an extent in the global economy. But the people who pay the worst of that price are always going to be the poorest, the urban poor in the West who have the least recource to pay higher prices for necessities, the subsistance farmers and fishermen of Africa, the slum-dwellers and displaced of places like India and China, etc. In short, the people who have no wiggle-room and no cushion to fall back on — and these are the people with the least political voice of any. They will pay the worst of any price first and most, and while that will inevitably translate to pinch and inconvenience for richer populations eventually, it gives us decades in which to find other ways to preserve the system which benefits the richer populations. So to sum up, no, don’t count on the collapse of capitalism being some inevitable outgrowth of global crises, especially of little old peak oil by itself.

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*(The “10% rule”, in ecology, is the rule of thumb that for any given species about 10% of the biomass in its surroundings will be edible to it, and about 10% of the biomass in its surroundings will be trying to eat it. Humans haven’t played by that rule since we discovered agriculture and started building cities.)